The present invention is directed, in general, to videotelephony and, more specifically, to a personal, portable video telephone system, apparatus and methods of operation thereof.
Traditionally, telephone and video communication systems have been bifurcated. Conventional telephone systems (or PSTN systems) operate at a bandwidth appropriate for voice communications, and typically provide spontaneous, point-to-point communications, such as two-way voice and data services, between two end users. Contrastingly video distribution systems (including cable television systems), operate at a much broader bandwidth than telephone systems, and are usually employed to broadcast pre-determined, high quality, full-motion video and audio concurrently to a plurality of subscribers.
It has long been felt that, if the best features of voice and video communication systems could be combined appropriately, fully interactive videotelephony would become feasible. Accordingly, given its apparent advantages, videotelephony has been the subject of commercial development by multiple entities, for many years. Although the first videophone appeared as early as the 1930s, a commercially viable videophone has yet to be introduced, even though significant efforts have been devoted to developing the same. This has been due, in large part, to the relatively high cost, complexity both in design and use, the inability to concurrently provide quality image and sound, and the inability to provide a network infrastructure capable of two-way communications with minimal signal degradation.
Current attempts at video telephony typically resemble traditional business telephone desk sets with the addition of a display monitor and a camera, as well as associated controls for operating the videophone. The cost of such devices is typically in excess of U.S. $1000, which is above the level of affordability for many users. This is compounded since it currently takes at least two videophones to make a video call. These devices are often relatively large, and not portable.
The quality of the image and sound is typically substantially less that what we have become accustomed to for our normal communications. Minimal capability, if any, is provided for accommodating different ambient conditions. Similarly, minimum capability is provided for different audio characteristic (e.g., canceling ambient noise and feedback within the audio signal, accommodating concurrent conversations by both parties to the call). Furthermore, the signal processing utilized, including the techniques used for compressing and decompressing the resulting audio and video signals, has not been optimized for a videophone application. As a result, the quality of both the transmitted and received video is much less than what is expected from a communications system. For example, varying ambient light conditions often result in over exposed and under exposed pictures. Movement of the user often results in both a significant degradation in image quality as well as the possibility that the camera can no longer capture the image of the user (e.g., outside of the limited range of view of the camera.)
In addition, videophones are typically very complex to use. In order to communicate with the various communications networks there is a complicated set-up process to configure the videophone to the particular communications network being utilized. Even if a videophone can work with multiple types of communications networks, they are far from “plug‘n’play” with any network. In addition, the videophone must be located where it can be directly connected to the available communication network via an Ethernet or comparable connection. This severely limits the flexibility in locating and using the videophone where you want to use it as opposed to where it must be physically connected. Since a videophone typically uses traditional IP addressing, a user must enter a number such as 192.121.121.121. Such a number sequence is different from what we are accustomed to as a standard phone number. Current videophones are often very difficult to set up and use. There is typically no provision for the telephone services and applications such as caller id, call waiting, call forwarding, conferencing and the like that we have come to expect. Videophones are expected to work across long distances which encompass multiple networks and network infrastructures. Delays in transmissions and the presence of noise degrade the signal quality. Even though current videophones often advertise high frame rates and transmission speeds they do not typically achieve these speeds due to the limited upstream and downstream characteristics of the communications network. This results in degraded image and sound quality, jitter, lack of synchronicity between the voice and video, etc.